


It's the Best Time of the Year

by longwhitecoats



Category: Cordelia (Movie Poster 2020)
Genre: Crueltide, F/M, Horror, Monsters, Murder Mystery, Time Loop, casefic, dubcon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-18
Updated: 2020-12-18
Packaged: 2021-03-10 23:40:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,268
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28145490
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/longwhitecoats/pseuds/longwhitecoats
Summary: Every day was Christmas, and every Christmas was murder.
Relationships: Man (Cordelia Movie Poster)/Woman (Cordelia Movie Poster)
Comments: 11
Kudos: 19
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	It's the Best Time of the Year

**Author's Note:**

  * For [badritual](https://archiveofourown.org/users/badritual/gifts).



Every day was Christmas, and every Christmas was murder.

He’d lost count several weeks’ worth of Christmases ago. All of it had begun to blur. The cold ringing of the telephone that woke him before dawn, the murmuration of the cloud of sergeants who greeted his arrival at the scene as they parted before him, and the flash of lights in shop windows as he went about his rounds of questioning had all become a blur of cream, grey, and gold. Like a Turner painting, unfinished and murky, with three bright drops of scarlet at the center. Three murders. On Christmas.

“Detective Hare? Your orders, sir?” Wieniawski was leaning over him tremulously. Any lower and he’d plunge right into the river Cam, just like the third victim.

Hare straightened. On the first dozen rounds or so of this godforsaken day, he’d actually given thought to it. Then, as new angles on the case diminished, it became mechanical. Now, he simply lit a cigarette. Behind him, Wieniawski and Ferrara conferred in whispers. He’d always had a reputation for arrogance; that came with hiring a University man to the local force, he supposed. Might as well let that cover for the panic slowly rising inside of him as he faced yet another in a series of inescapable days of bloodshed.

“Inventory,” he said at last, more a conversational rubric than a question.

Wieniawski hopped to. “Yes, sir. Two pound fifty in his trouser pockets, no other possessions or debris there. Possibly washed away while he was in the river or removed by the assailant. Shoes still on; quite expensive, those. Cufflinks had the Trinity crest but his scarf was Kings; we’re looking at both colleges’ rosters. Nothing in his coat pockets.” He flipped the notebook shut.

“Jacket pockets, you mean.”

“What?”

“That’s a suit jacket he’s wearing.”

“Yes, sir. Nothing in his jacket pockets.”

Grunting, Hare lifted his cigarette to have another drag and then paused. “Coat pocket.” He turned around and looked at the body, really _looked_ , as he hadn’t done in many days. “Ferrara, refresh my aging memory, please – it was bloody cold last night, yes?”

Ferrara raised his eyebrows. “Yes indeed. I see what you mean, sir.”

“All right. After you get through the rosters and ID him—and I’m sure you will,” he added, catching himself, “ask his mates what kind of coat he wore. Pray it’s a distinctive one.” Hare ground the cigarette out in the mud. “And then _find it._ ”

*

Hare spent the afternoon irritating Detective Banerjee by pacing back and forth in the station as he waited for the phone to ring. “What’s eating you?” Banerjee chided. “Cool as cucumber, you. Never mind what anyone else says, even the Chief. And now you’re marching back and forth enough to wear a hole in the rug. If we had one, which, of course, we don’t.”

“Pardon my usurpation of your usual domain,” Hare retorted. “I am very occasionally human.”

“Nice of you to join us,” said Banerjee. “There’s Ferrara now.”

Hare practically jumped toward the station door to meet him. Ferrara was in a state; Hare had forgotten that his sergeants had of course discovered the two other murders as they combed rosters of missing students. Quite grim – one strangled to death in the backs of King’s and left in a heap by the bridge, the other stabbed in St. Edward’s Passage, only just out of sight of King’s Parade. If they were all murdered by the same assailant, he’d had a busy evening indeed.

“But no description of the coat?” Hare pressed, with perhaps too little consideration for Ferrara’s shock.

“I—yes, one of the porters knew it. Here. He said it was quite striking. Probably why the killer didn’t want it found at the scene.” He gave Hare the notebook. His hands were shaking.

“All right, Ferrara. Have you notified the students yet? No, I’ll do it. Their names are in here, yes? Off with you. Go have some tea or something.” Hare caught Banerjee’s eye as he shooed Ferrara away. Banerjee nodded approvingly. Hare scowled.

The coat sounded like a doozy, if the porter’s description was correct: _Woolen greatcoat, double-breasted, bright yellow tartan._ But why had the killer taken it? To obscure the student’s identity? His name had been found readily enough: Dennis MacLeod of King’s, just matriculated that Michelmas. The other two students, Henry Perse of Clare and Nicholas Burnyeat of Corpus Christi, had no apparent connection apart from also having stayed in town over Christmas. Why bother to hide it, then? Or was the coat taken for some other reason?

The morning services had all let out, and Hare was obliged to dodge innumerable jollymakers as they waved cheerfully to one another and wished each other happy Christmas, no doubt all heading toward turkey dinners and festive music on the wireless. He tucked his hands deep into his coat pockets and walked as briskly as he could. The porter had also given Ferrara an address where some of MacLeod’s friends might be found, a little way up the road that led to the women’s college.

A cheerful air was playing as Hare approached the door of the row house, whether from a live musician or a gramophone he could not tell. He knocked loudly; the sound increased to a dull roar as the door opened, accompanied by a spill of laughter, chatter, and the sweet smell of spiced alcohol. The young man who answered looked flush with it. “Yes?”

Hare produced his badge. “I need to speak to anyone here who knows Dennis MacLeod,” he said.

The young man laughed. “Well, who _doesn’t_ know Denny,” he said, waving his hand carelessly. “Come in.”

He turned and sashayed back into the house before Hare could explain or question him further, leaving the door ajar. Hare went in.

It was a finer Christmas party than any Hare had attended; attractive, soft-faced young people drifted between well-appointed rooms in fashions Hare was sure he’d never been able to afford in his life. Candles and low lamps suffused the place with a golden glow, and tinsel gleamed from wreaths and other adornments. For a moment, he simply studied the partygoers, wondering which of them had been out in the snow committing murder early this morning. The fellow with his sleeves rolled up, daring a friend to an arm-wrestling contest? The glassy-eyed young man deep in his cups on the back of a couch, spilling wine onto his white shirtfront, one arm draped diffidently around his companion? His companion--

Hare swallowed.

Never before had he understood the rather purple turns of phrase used to dramatize a momentous meeting; he was not a romantic. But now, perfectly aware of the dramatic irony of the sentiment, given the endless repetition of Christmas he’d been trapped in for God knew how long, Hare could think only one thing – that time had stopped.

She was long-limbed and tall, nearly his own height, wrapped in a gold and black damask dress that stood out against her pale skin. She smoked a matching cigarette with unpainted lips. As he stared, she seemed to feel his gaze; she turned; and Hare looked into the strangest eyes he had ever seen. They were such a pale grey as to be nearly white, but the rays of the irises were as dark as her pupil. They gave the impression of clock faces.

Then she blinked, slid down the couch, and strode toward him.

“You aren’t one of Peter’s,” she said, as if that meant something to him. “You’re new.”

“Arthur Hare at your service,” he replied. He ought to have said _Detective Hare_ ; why hadn’t he?

“Cordelia,” she said, and that was all. She took a drag of her cigarette and held out her other hand, limp-wristed, toward him.

Feeling as though he had strayed into another life entirely, and perhaps a bit lightheaded from exhaustion, he took her hand and kissed it.

Suddenly his face was in her hand; she held him there for a long moment, regarding him from above. He remained bowing. Had anyone else touched him in such a manner, he would have responded angrily, even violently, but something in her mien demanded his deference. He waited.

“Yes,” she murmured. “All right.” She released him and stepped back. “Won’t you have a drink?”

He was on duty; he needed to question MacLeod’s friends; he should not fraternize with civilians connected to a case. He followed her into another room and took the glass of sherry she handed him.

The evening seemed to stretch out infinitely, and yet it was over far too soon. They talked together of the meaning of art, the grand movements of history, and the blunt cruelty of humankind. He had never before found a soul with whom he could discuss such things, except, every once in a while, Banerjee; and she spoke eloquently and with fire, seeming educated beyond what he would expect even of a Cambridge professor, let alone a student. She quoted _The Lives of the Artists_ fluently in both English and Italian, and she described the Somme as if she’d been there. He knew; he had.

The hours melted like wax. The other partygoers faded one by one into the growing gloom, and the light seemed to shrink until it was a globe just large enough to encompass the two of them together. He found he was sitting at her feet, gazing up. Her hand was in his hair, pulling none too gently. No one had ever touched him like that.

“Come upstairs,” she said. “The party’s over.”

Hare shook his head to clear it. The room was empty, and a clock nearby announced an hour so late it was early. He wondered for a moment what would happen if he was here when the phone rang at his apartment to wake him for Christmas morning again.

No; he had come here as a detective. He must go home. He would try again tomorrow. Today.

He kissed her hand once more and rose. “I’ll see you again,” he said. “I promise.”

“Yes,” she said, disquietingly, and let him go.

He barely remembered the stumble through the streets. When he woke in his room, before dawn, it was to the familiar Christmas carillon of death.

*

When Hare arrived at the scene, his blood froze in his veins.

There were two bodies.

“Sergeant,” he called weakly. “On the phone—you said—”

“Homicide victims,” Ferrara said. “Wieniawski, you did say homicide?”

“Victims,” Hare muttered, wiping his face. “ _Victims_.”

It was the first thing that had changed since the horrible string of endless Christmases began. And now he was lost. Did this mean this was real? Would today count? Or would he wake up again tomorrow to the same phone call, or worse, to even _more_ murders—

“Sir?” Wieniawski was touching his arm. “Are you feeling ill, sir?”

Hare pressed the back of his hand to his mouth, fearing if he spoke, the whole tale would come spilling out. All right, he was a _detective_ , damn it all, this was his _job_. He fumbled for a cigarette, lit it, inhaled, and said, “Method.”

“One drowned, we think,” said Ferrara. “Skin is consistent with having been submerged for several hours. The other... well.”

Hare looked. The other, still wearing his very plain black overcoat, lay on his side. His face was placid, a little familiar, perhaps someone Hare had passed every day on the way to this scene. Beyond the face was empty air. He’d had his head bashed in.

“Find out who they are,” he said. “Check the student rosters. That one’s missing his coat. Get a description of it. All right?” He walked off before anyone could answer, shivering, not warmed by the cigarette at all.

*

Had he changed something?

Hare barely saw his own boots in the snow in front of him as he trudged toward the station. What had he changed? His routine had varied every day; he had made no effort to practice the rhythms of his clockwork world. Had each Christmas been different from the others, and he had never noticed? But surely, surely a fourth murder was significant.

Banerjee was at his desk looking over paperwork from a burglary. Hare felt his emotions gather into a single point. Eswar was the steadiest, most sensible person he knew. He could help. Hare needed help.

He brought two cups of tea into the office; either that or his desperate expression made Banerjee raise his eyebrows in shock. “Okay, Arthur,” he said. “Let’s have it.”

Hare gave him the whole wretched story from the beginning, editorializing as little as possible. Eswar nodded along with only an intermittent _hm_ , but Hare could see the wheels turning. He was grateful that Eswar accepted his account as plain fact; Hare had never thought himself mad, and it made him glad to know that Eswar believed him.

“Well,” Eswar said at last, “the coat was the first break you’d had in the case, right?”

“Yes,” Hare said, sagging. “Nothing else to it. No connection between the victims.”

“That you know of.”

“That we know of.”

“And the coat led you to the party?”

“No, it wasn’t related.—Wait. Yes. Of course it did. We’d talked to the porters, but no one mentioned the coat before. It must have jogged his memory, and that’s where the address came from.”

“So it could be the coat,” Banerjee said.

“Or it could be what happened at that address.”

“Hmm.”

Hare considered. “I have to go back. The answer is there. I just didn’t find it. I got—distracted.” He flushed.

But Banerjee didn’t tease him. His expression was serious. “I’ll find this coat,” he said quietly. “All right? Arthur?”

Hare nodded. “Thank you, Eswar.”

Banerjee smiled. “You’re our best bloodhound. Go back to that house and grill them. What’s the number? I’ll ring you there.”

*

Hare had every intention of grilling every drunken lout in the place. But when he found himself on the doorstep, all he could think about was her.

“Cordelia,” he breathed as the door opened.

This time there was no delay; they came together like magnets. He kissed her hand, they spoke some greeting or perhaps some introduction, and then he was back inside that globe of golden light, their conversation eddying and turning like the current of a river.

She was even more beautiful than he had remembered, he thought. Her dress was silver tonight, and she glittered with every emphatic gesture. Her curious eyes seemed wide and liquid as she listened to him. He could barely concentrate on what either of them said; it hardly seemed to matter. She was all that mattered.

“Come upstairs,” she said.

“Yes,” said Hare, and followed her.

The music and chatter of the party dimmed as they climbed the stairs. There was a couch on the landing; he wondered whether he should sit, or if she would lead him into one of the dark bedrooms down the corridor. As he opened his mouth to ask a question, someone came stomping up the stairs after them.

“Phone call,” said the interloper. “For him, I think.”

“You can take it in the back room,” she said. “In there.”

He went where she pointed and switched on a lamp. The bed was piled high with coats, scarves, and gloves, no doubt belonging to the guests. Hare crossed to a small table opposite the door, where a modern phone sat on a doily. He lifted the receiver.

“Hare,” he said.

“Arthur,” came Banerjee’s voice. “We have a lead on the coat.”

Hare heard Cordelia come in behind him.

“Someone spotted it on Jesus Green,” Banerjee said, his voice made surreal and electric by the telephone wires. “A young woman was wearing it. Described as unusually tall and pale, with strange eyes.”

There was a creak as the door began to close.

“No,” Hare whispered.

“Arthur? Are you all right?”

Hare replaced the receiver, silencing Eswar’s increasingly urgent questions with a soft click. The hair on the back of his neck was standing on end.

He turned around.

Cordelia stood in front of the closed bedroom door, on the back of which hung a bright yellow tartan coat.

The fourth victim’s face suddenly swam up before Hare’s eyes, and he understood why he’d recognized him – not from endless iterations of trudging past Christmas revelers, but from the party, this party, last night. He’d been the glassy-eyed drunk on Cordelia’s arm. And she had thrown him away. _She took the coat because she wanted it. Just like she took him._

_Just like she took all of them._

He shoved the table violently toward her. His legs felt numb as he sprang. She caught him fast and crushed him against the wall, her grip on his arm inhumanly strong. He felt her teeth graze the back of his neck. A shudder ran through his entire body, and, to his horror, he felt his groin begin to tighten and warmth to fill him.

“Cordelia,” he gasped.

“Don’t talk,” she said.

Her hands seemed to be everywhere. She held him flush against the wallpaper until his cheek became impressed with its design; she explored the hollow of his throat; she slid her palms down the outside of his slacks. He writhed. He whispered her name.

When she tore his clothes apart, he could have sworn he felt the rake of talons on his skin. She turned him, lifted him up as he might have lifted a woman, his arse in her hands and legs flopping to either side of her. She kissed him, hot and fierce, and he gave underneath her heat like melting snow.

They rubbed together like that so long he forgot where he was. When he summoned his faculties, he felt himself surrounded by the walls of a dark, soft nest, and all he could feel was the demanding, savage desire in his own body.

“Please,” he begged. “Cordelia.”

She enveloped him.

*

It was nearly dawn.

Hare opened his eyes. He was in his own flat. Grey light seeped in the windows of the casement. He lay in his own bed; no one lay with him. The room was silent. He had not been awakened by a phone call. The clock on his bedstand was just a few minutes earlier than usual.

“Happy Christmas,” said Cordelia.

Hare started. She was sitting on his trunk across the room, dressed—if one could call it dressed—in a galaxy of starlight. Her eyes bored into him.

“You’re worried about that phone call, aren’t you,” she said, walking toward him. She was tall, so tall her hair was brushing the ceiling and yet her long fingers stretched down toward him in his bed. “You’re worried there’ll be another one.”

She leaned down over him, and he felt pinned, helpless. Like prey.

“I won’t take anyone else,” she said. “Not if you stay with me.”

“Where?” Hare whispered, terrified.

She smiled. “Here,” she said. Her clockwork eyes ticked backwards. “Christmas.”

Hare thought of the back of that man’s head. He thought of the intoxicating golden conversation they’d had, and of half a year of stopped time. He nodded.

“Oh darling,” Cordelia said, brushing his cheeks with too-long fingers as she leaned down toward him, and then there was no more sound.

On the window ledge nearest the bed a hardcover volume lay open, pressed flat by reading and rereading. Droplets of red fell like holly berries on snow over the final line: _And to all a good night._

**Author's Note:**

> Recipient, I had a lot of fun writing this for you! I tend naturally toward fluff, but I loved your request. I hope this fulfills your Crueltide dreams :)
> 
> Thanks so much to my betas, Toft and Dr_Whom!


End file.
